Transmission of media, such as streaming video content, across wireless networks may employ a number of different protocols, including the IEEE 802.11 protocol. The 802.11 protocol breaks the media into “packets” of information which are then individually transmitted to the receiving device. During the packet transmissions, the receiver will periodically acknowledge the packets' receipt to the transmitter and will adjust its network parameters, such as its network address, to accommodate other devices on the network. To improve efficiency, the transmitter may group the packets into sets, so that the receiver need not individually acknowledge receipt of each particular packet. Grouping the packets into these sets, or blocks, is known as aggregation. The single group acknowledgment provided by the receiver is referred to as a Block-ACK. Aggregation and acknowledgment via a Block-ACK improves throughput and efficiency for 802.11 implementations as they are handled by a medium access control (MAC) layer of a device. The Block-ACK also reduces compression and collision probabilities from hidden nodes.
Unfortunately, despite these benefits, aggregation may also produce additional end to end latency. End to end latency may be unfavorable for “mirroring” applications where communication must rapidly occur in two or more directions, such as for gaming applications and interactive display applications. Thus, there exists a need to employ wireless data acknowledgement aggregation without the undesirable undue latency penalty.